This week Intrahost has a special series of blogs looking at how Cloud Computing is affecting real businesses. Growth is important to all sectors, particular small and medium businesses. As a technology provider, Intrahost is in a unique position to talk to these businesses, find out how they’re looking to expand and how they want their technology and IT provision to be part of that.
First up, scaling.

One of the hardest elements of businesses is projection and planning. If the last five years have taught us anything it’s that’s you don’t know what’s around the corner. The economy can throw a curve ball at you and you need to be able to react fast. The companies, both small and large, who have done well during the recession are those who have been able to adapt.

Yet in such a changeable environment how can you hope to have any kind of strategy?

A scalable technology solution that’s flexible and can grow with you, or be scaled back when you need it, is ideal. The last thing you want is to be locked into an expensive deal when the money is flowing, only to start worrying about the outlay and expenditure if things start to get tight.

939 Design is exactly one of those small firms that’s been able to grow exponentially over the past few years. Demand for their web hosting skills grew rapidly over a short period of time. It was great to see the firm expanding and generating more income but they had a concern about their existing infrastructure. Their Internet Service Provider, or ISP, simply couldn’t keep up. The customer support wasn’t up to scratch. Many companies can get into the same situation. When it feels like technology is holding you back it is frustrating, you can see and almost touch the opportunity, but feel like you’re being held back.

939 Design got in touch with Intrahost. They wanted a resilient platform that they could rely on. They also wanted flexibility. If they needed to grow memory and disk space to accommodate new customer and new clients, they wanted to be able to offer that, without worrying about costs and whether the server could take it. As a busy firm it needed to be implemented without any hold up or problem for them and their clients.

Intrahost provided 939 Design with a Virtual Private Server. It offers a stable and a flexible hosting environment that is secure for them and their customer’s data they’re hosting. Most importantly, the VPS is much cheaper than a dedicated server meaning they would start to see the benefit of the growth in their business and adapt it without having to invest in new and expensive technology. The VPS can be scaled meaning however busy 939 Design are, their clients don’t receive any change in service. They also have committed data rates meaning even if one website suddenly gets a lot of traffic, there will be no drop in capacity.

Identifying an area where you can grow your business is exciting. When clients start to invest in your idea you know you’ve made the right choice and there’s a potential for even more expansion. However, the last thing you want is to feel like your technology is holding you back. A scalable solution, that works flexibly with you needs now, as well as in the future, means you can explore new income strands and win more clients, without worrying if you have the infrastructure to cope.